Mitch Ashley on AI, Cloud Competition, and the Future of Software Development | AWS re:Invent 2025

Hey, everyone. We're back here on, uh, Textron TV with our AWS Reinvent coverage. You know, as I mentioned, Nick Patience had a run out, so we had him really emphasize the beginning of our conversation.

But I wanna continue our conversation with Mitch. Um, so Mitch, it's good to have you back. You know, you've been podcasting up a storm too, right?

You did something with Brad Shiman. Yes, I did. Agents of Dev, our new podcast.

I love that one. Yes. You know, it's all about the agents, human agents, computer agents.

Absolutely. Digital coworkers. Yeah.

And then we did a, uh, a, a, uh, cyber still cyber still cyber after all these years, baby. That was a, that was a throwback. But you, you spent the day today, I know in a bunch of meetings, keynotes, listening in.

Most of our audience here probably wasn't here in person to watch this. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

What, what could you give them to take home, Mitch? You know, I think, um, I always look at where do things start, because how's this going to set up AWS for the next 12 months? I think Nick made the point about it's not of end of the year conference only for AWS anymore, but what they did is this is gonna help them for three, six months, because things are moving that fast across all the vendor environments.

And they started the conversation with, at least in the pre-brief, with the analysts who said, we're gonna be talking about up here in the stack. We're not just gonna be talking about down here. And they actually started the analyst briefing really talking about kinda what's happening at the user or the user of AWS services layer.

Mm-hmm. And of course, um, Brad teed things up nicely with, with Kiro for me, about that as the, uh, as the AI IDE that AWS has launched back, I guess midsummer and they've standardized internally on, now they've, they've specified this as a spec driven IDE I'm not sure that's a sustainable advantage for, for them, but they'll figure out kind of what their place is with that. The big push was around let's really take agents to the next level, which meant agents that can scale at very large scale.

They talked about billions of agents at some point. Mm-hmm. They talked about long running agents, the agents that do work over days Yes.

As well as maybe even weeks or longer. Uh, but they also subdivided that into some new agents that they launched. We talked about the AWS security agent.

I agree with you on the AWS DevOps agent. I think it's little dev large ops. Yeah.

It's an ops agent. Yeah. It's, it's really a DevOps agent.

Mm-hmm. Per se. But, you know, That's okay's to start.

So back that Up. It's a start. Exactly.

You've gotta get there somewhere less specific about what they called the Kero autonomous agent, which is dev work, if you want to categorize that. They didn't put too much meat on the bone there. So there's a lot to build from.

I see this as kind of the scaffolding. Think of it in development terms. Right.

Here's the structure of what we're putting together for the agent framework. You didn't hear Dev, uh, Q Developer much today? No.

Well, last year that was huge. All about it. And then Agent, agent Core came out midyear, uh mm-hmm.

About, I guess earlier this year. Uh, and now all about Agent Core as the development platform, if you will. Of course, Q developer's still there as part of it, but I think that's the new framework that they're building the scaffolding from.

And that's where we'll see a lot now. I think a lot of what was introduced here is table stakes. There wasn't anything that was like, oh, that's super innovative.

Nobody else is doing that. Maybe a little bit with Forge about creating your own, your models using fair enough AWS's models with your data. Okay.

That's interesting. But that's okay. This is not a world where you're gonna pull everybody over with one announcement and suddenly the industry goes, oh my God, what are we gonna do now?

This is, But I, I think this, This is a marathon race where we're watching Absolutely quarter mile by quarter mile as this thing's unfold Quarter by quarter is, is a good way of thinking about it. And, and I think it also goes to what we were talking about earlier, and I, and Daniel Newman mentioned this in my interview with him earlier, which is this was a bit of a, of AWS playing catch up. Oh, it's major catch up.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not unknown that people think AWS is behind to the, the other hyperscalers, if you will.

And you can argue whether they're, they have strength. I mean, look at, they're a massive company. They're a huge Customer.

They're still an 800 pound gorilla, and they still look, you know, I'm a football fan and, but any sports fan, I'd rather I, my team is the team that's ahead than the team that has to play catch up. Mm-hmm. Right.

It's always nice to be ahead however, Or it could be the Broncos and win by one point when the, you know, the guy donks the the kick. Yeah. Or the two point try.

Right. You know, these Colorado people, they have one good season and they don't, they just kind of work it into every conversation. You're gotta be hearing about this for the next 10 years.

It doesn't matter how it turns Out. Come on, Mitch. You want both?

Say it with me. You want both. But, um, that being said, that being you had to do something on a week when the steel is like sunk the Place out.

I kick a guy when he is down. That's what I, That's what, yeah, that's what it is. But let, let's, let's go back though and, and, and talk a little bit on, on on this agent stuff though, Mitch, you know, it's interesting you said that he opened up the analyst Reefing by saying, we're gonna go at the top of the stack here and talk about what it's like to be, uh, an AWS customer.

Aw. WS user. And then everything was about developers.

Mm-hmm. Now it's true. Developers were the lifeblood of AWS early on.

That's, that's what built that in a credit Card. Right. They, they whipped out their credit.

I was just gonna say, they whipped out their credit card. They spun up a few instances. Mm-hmm.

And off we went shadow it at its best. Is the developer still the engine that drives AWS or is it, is it the infrastructure play? Is it the security folks?

Is it the platform? Is it, you know, ops, SRE and all, all of the rest? Or is still AWS laser focused on the developer?

Well, I learned early in my career, you could tell who drew the diagram by what's at the center. Brad Shiman draws the diagram. There's gonna be a database of data, fabric data, you know something, right?

Mm-hmm. Nick, it's gonna be AI models, it's gonna be AI chips, Mitch, it's gonna be all about the developer and how you create software, right? Yep.

So, you know, the AI is supposed to be the, the death of the developer. And I immediately said, yeah, okay. You don't know how software is developed if that's what you really think is gonna happen.

Developers at the tip of the spear of ai, that's where, that's where the first people are adopting the latest innovations in most cases. And what we're seeing is it, it isn't eliminating the developer. It's actually emphasizing what developers do because you see AI moving to the command line interface.

Oh, I thought, I thought we weren't gonna have to do that anymore. No. Guess what?

We're putting AI at that level. So develop level. So developers are productive.

We're building in fabric. We're we're building in control planes for, to be able to manage and put in security guardrails and do things like that. You look at even an IBM tool with their orchestrator.

Here's the end user interface, the non-pro developer. There's the pro developer for the same tool to develop and orchestrate agents. So someone still orchestrates, creates, thinks, drives, innovates.

What AI is doing today, it's still very much, you know, developers, I think not in the loop. I think it's developers driving the loop, whether we do all the work, I think we're doing Less of the work. Yeah.

It, it goes back to something I wrote and I think I did some videos on, you know, to paraphrase, Billy Joel AI isn't starting the fire. No, I didn't know he said that really Well. Something about starting a fire, wasn't it?

Did I tell you Billy Joe lives across the intercoastal from the House? You have told me that about four times. Yes.

Yeah. Every time we go out there, we wave, we wave, we invited him over the house and every Time I ran in your boat as we go, by Fact, well, that's why I'm playing the Billy Joe music really loud. I'm hoping he'll hear me.

But someone started the fire. Mm-hmm. Right?

And I, and I, you know, and then it goes back to AI is is the a tool, it's a developer tool, it's an ops tool, it's a security person tool, but the spark is still the spark of human creation. And I, I don't think that, not in my work lifetime. I don't think that's gonna change.

I mean, look at it. I mean, we, we we're, we're using tools to create videos that we would've never created before. Right.

Just kind of laughable, fun things. Yep. But useful things too.

Um, the agents of Dev podcast I created with one tool, an idea of what we do for our logo. Brad took that and took to the next level and like, yeah, that's what I want. Because that's very much sort of the comic style.

Let's do that. Mm-hmm. And so I couldn't have drawn that.

I couldn't have no, you know, even called up somebody and told them what I wanted. 'cause I didn't know what I wanted yet. But through using a creative, you know, mechanism, a tool like ai, look at what you can create.

But I, I'll so think back to the first time you started using Photoshop. And for me, I, I'll tell you this, I'm gonna go back to 1995. I'm using Carell drawer.

Mm. If you remember, I do remember Corral Carre drawer and layers in Carere drawer that allowed you to do extrusions Stuff. My carre draw didn't ended in r it's this Carell draw not drawer.

Well, I'm from New York. Oh, in New York, sometimes we add an R, sometimes we take off an RI can never tell. Can I have an R please?

Alex can never tell. But, um, that a turned what he guess what it says, can I buy a valve? Can I buy a valve?

But we don't have no stinking mouth. But anyway, but, but seriously, Mitchell, this has been, you know, this, this is not new to tech. This is, this is the way, as the Mandalorian would say, This is the way, This is the way, Like how you got that in there.

That's right. Like when I did that, I worked that right in smooth. Like something never changed.

No, you, I was still thinking the R thing, but okay. Yeah. And I said the R in Mandalorian, you did Mandalorian.

Yeah. Because it's only R's at the end that we have problems with. Still, still can't figure out how it works.

You know, I gotta sit here and take abuse from a Nebraska person. Could you believe this? Um, I was in New York.

I learned a thing, a few, few thing of two new I learned about you New Yorker and veterans. But let's get back to AWS reinvent, Mitch. Alright.

Um, you know, Brad said something that I didn't really realize in until he said it. We haven't heard a lot about data and databases and all of that stuff, and data storage. And, and that's always sort of a, no pun intended, but that's always a bedrock of AWS's.

It is, you know, Reinvent. I, I don't know if this is a reason, but we've had a succession of vendor announcements about data fabrics, AI data fabric, AI data fabric, you know, going from Oracle to, you know, you name it. I don't know if that's the reason why they didn't emphasize that this, I think it's more they have to catch, here's my point about developers are still ruling the world.

So software rules the world. They're catching up on the developer, right? They're trying to capture the development environment.

Again, I'm drawing the picture, so this is what I'm putting at the center. Okay. And, and here's why.

I think why Nick, to talk, Nick talked about the advantage of who has the advantage with models and, and what, what Google has, what Microsoft has isn't just the open AI relationship that they're now diversifying with. They've got the massive developer community, right? Yeah.

They have 150 million developers who use GitHub. All of the IDE tools, all virtually all are based on open source, uh, versions of visual code, visual, yeah. Studio Code.

Um, that's what the competition for, is to get those developed, to be creating not just the agents, but the tools, the, the fabric, the, uh, scaffolding, the, the next innovations about how we build and create agents. That's what, that's what they need. Now.

We're gonna be doing that a lot faster with a lot, lot more innovation from the same group of people, but it's still about creating that software. Yeah. And it makes the world go around.

It's eating the world, but it already ate the World, ate the world, I guess to see Someone else said we, we were gonna be moving from software factories to intelligence engines. That's, that's, yeah. That's SAT's phrase, whatever that means.

But yes. Well, Satya said it. We're also don't gonna have sa SaaS software.

It's still around, but we will see what happens with that. And I, but I'm not running Microsoft, so who, who knows. That's what I was just gonna say.

You are Mitchell. He Satya. Yeah, I think, I think that he carries a few more sticks in his bag than I do, but yeah.

I got a mean three irons, so, Okay. I play golf with you, Mitch. You are.

No, I knew Sja. I worked with Saja. You are no sja.

I'm no three Irons. Anyway, we've gotta get wrapping it up here, Mitch. We've got two more days.

You'll come on in and we'll do actually, we're doing Textron gang early tomorrow morning. Well, you know, as the, uh, this is the philosopher, the Terminator said, I'll be back. I'll be back.

We'll be back tomorrow with even more from text from Textron on Textron tv from AWS reinvent. We hope you've enjoyed this discussion. If you could tell, you know, we have a good, great time with the future of analysts.

We enjoy, you know, talking shop, just, uh, enjoying, you know, it's a great time. You know, Mike Ard told me, tell you, it's a Chinese proverb. I thought it was an Irish proverb, but may you live in interesting times.

These are certainly interesting times. For now, though, that's gonna wrap it up. This is Alan Shimmel for Text on tv.

Thanks for watching.